They would then be able to enjoy political independence in the Lords – and to ensure this is continuous I would debar them from seeking re-election to keep them impervious to party discipline.Second, more Peers in the Lords by virtue of their everyday responsibilities representing significant parts of British opinion.Here, there is a rich menu to choose from: Nobel Prize winners; major religious leaders to supplement those Church of England Bishops who already have seats in the House; representatives of the universities; heads of the Armed Forces; presidents of representative business organisations; former senior Civil Servants; leaders from charities or the media We could select to taste. On one of the political programmes yesterday a shadow cabinet member argued that Mandelson’s private life was utterly irrelevant, but the fact that the BBC had issued a memo instructing staff not to mention it meant that he felt obliged to come into the studio to protest. And, probably more than ever before, the personal ethics of individual candidates have been tested in the campaign. Sir: Your article “In defence of IMF austerity” (Business Outlook, 29 October) does not take account of the failure of previous IMF austerity packages in tackling financial crisis, or their impact in terms of deepening poverty in countries where they are applied. Most weeks ministers present us with the equivalent of those Xmas hampers which appear so enticing, but on closer examination offer little more than a satsuma and a jar of pickled onions.Their intention (the ministers’, not the makers of the pickled onions) is to change the public mood, before more substantial policies are announced to the electorate. If hereditary Peers are to go – and they are – we should know what would replace them Life Peers will continue.

But how should we replace the departing hereditaries? I see two sorts of new Peers.First, a limited number of elected Peers, but elected once only for a fixed tenure of, say, ten years. But suppose the outcome were an overall Labour majority in the UK, but a Conservative majority in England.That has happened before and been readily accepted. But devolution in Scotland and Wales has changed that and now the Government must deal with the consequences.And we have the Jenkins Report. Unsurprisingly, a system has been proposed that offers two classes of Members of Parliament and a far greater likelihood of coalition government than ever known.The essence of coalition governments is that deals are reached by backroom consultations after the election and not determined in the ballot box. Therefore, the Government is inherently less stable than when one party has a clear majority.The Government is also proposing to reform the House of Lords But to call what is on offer “reform” is a misnomer. What is on offer is piecemeal and self-serving: it is the abolition of hereditary peerages with no indication of what will replace them.A proper reform is timely and I would welcome it. We must find a way of replicating the ironclad independence of the current House of Lords in its successors.First, we should accept that reform can improve the Lords and advocate measures to do so.

There are many possible outcomes to the next General Election, including an outright win for the Conservative Party. Let us turn our faces firmly against an English Parliament – an unhappy notion for a Unionist Party – and look at the options for an English element in our United Kingdom Parliament that can mirror the responsibilities of the Scottish Assembly. The most obvious solution would be a Grand Committee of all English MPs, although it would have to be understood that their decisions would not be over-ridden.
The Government has boxed itself in by its devolution policy. We do not want to return the suffering that was imposed on us… We would like to see peace in this country.”.

AS A CONSERVATIVE, I believe our Party should try and save the Union from Labour’s follies if we can. The commission: “Many people in this country would like to see perpetrators going to prison and serving long sentences. What is your view on this?” Ms Ngewu: “I do not agree with this view. We do not want to see people suffer in the same way that we did.. and we did not want our families to have suffered. Bishop Michael Nuttall said he thought many members of “die Engelse kerk”, the Anglican Church, owed an apology to the Afrikaner community for their attitude of moral superiority – “although our chief expression of apology must be to our black membership”.Finally, here is Cynthia Ngewu, whose son was killed by the police, giving evidence.

we may have redirected our quarrel with the British to our compatriots in South Africa”. invariably went hand in hand with severe personal trauma, financial loss and social disruption… we of the Presbytery often were not even aware of this suffering”.Britain wasn’t called upon to apologise, although General Constand Viljoen clearly thought that we should have done so. He pointed out that the trauma of the Boer War had never been resolved: “it conditioned the white tribe of Africa, the Afrikaners, to consolidate in a nation around the dangerous sentiments of a collective sense of injustice, discrimination and deprivation… The commission has also located the remains of 50 of those who disappeared and were killed so that they can be given proper funerals.There have been a lot of apologies, too. The Stellenbosch Presbytery of the Dutch Reformed Church told the commission that “when forced removals were carried out in our town, when people were forced to leave their historic neighbourhoods and had to resettle elsewhere, little or no protest was voiced by the Presbytery These removals…